'Donoghue poses powerful questions about faith and belief' (Newsday)Īvailable Novemfrom Hachette Audio as a digital download, and in Print and Ebook from Little, Brown & Company. Donoghue keeps us riveted' (Chicago Tribune) A Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist and 1 bestseller, The Wonder is the latest masterpiece from Man Booker Prizeshortlisted author Emma Donoghue. 'A fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna's dwindling body. 'Heartbreaking and transcendent'(New York Times) Dark and vivid, with complicated characters, this is a novel that lodges itself deep' (USA Today, 3/4 stars) Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels - a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Not for the first time this year, she’s the standout in a film that, given the remarkable personnel involved, really ought to pack a greater punch.Now a Netflix film starring Florence Pugh: In this “old-school page turner” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review) by the bestselling author of Room, an English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle-a girl said to have survived without food for months-and soon finds herself fighting to save the child's life. Pugh’s emblematic, muddy-hemmed blue dress - designed by Odile Dicks-Mireaux - marks her out against the windswept exteriors.

The bookending of the film with a contemporary studio setting and thoughts about storytelling falls a bit flat, as does the repeated use of a bird-in-cage thaumatrope.Īri Wegner’s cinematography finds striking tableaux against a backdrop that between the dramatic outdoors and the snotty interiors is almost overpoweringly green. An English nurse, Lib Wright, is summoned to a tiny village to observe what some are claiming as a medical anomaly.

He’s helped by a stellar cast who bring nuance to characters that - with lesser actors and writing - could have played like 19th century cartoons from Punch Magazine. Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghues The Wonder - inspired by numerous European and North American cases of fasting girls between the sixteenth century and the twentieth - is a psychological thriller about a childs murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. It requires all of the director’s not inconsiderable skill to make these elements work.

Every plot progression and twist - from the big reveal to the ludicrous denouement - seems designed to make the average telenovela look like The Bicycle Thieves. Unless you are absolutely fine with weapons-grade melodrama, this is possibly not the movie for you.

Still, the mystery of the starving child remains.

The wonder book by emma donoghue